Setup Repository

Starting with new project folder:

mkdir blogapi
cd blogapi

Create .gitignore

Create .gitignore file to tell git which files should not be maintained by the repository.

You could use the Github example, adding some more entries:

.venv*/
.dev*/
.vscode/

  • The .venv*/ entry allows us to create Python virtual environments within the project folder without getting them into the repository.

  • The .dev*/ entry allows us to have a sandbox directory within the project folder without getting it into the repository.

  • The .vscode/ entry makes sure that the VSCode workspace settings are not getting into the repository.

Create LICENSE

You could use Choose an open source license to choose a license for your project.

Create README.md

Create a README.md file for your project. To help you with getting started with README file, you could use ChatGPT with, for example, following prompt How to write a README.md file for a GitHub Python project?

There are also some great resources that might help you with creating readme for your project:

You could also give a try to readme generators:

I used following prompt with ChatGPT to get started:

I am creating a python project - a blog api with Django Rest Freamework. The project is going to be used for training purposes and is providing recipes about completing various activities during the implementation of a typical API with Django Rest Framework. Documentation folder stores a book-like documentaiton. Each recipe has a github branch. Create a README.md file for the project.

Setup the Project Folder as git Respository

For this recipe you need an empty remote repository. For example you could create one in GitHub.

Let’s now initialize a git repository in the project folder:

git init

git init
# Commit current files
git add .
git commit -m "first commit"
# Tell git that we want our main branch to be main
git branch -M main
# Tell git what is the remote repsitory - put your repository url here
git remote add origin https://github.com/vancun/django-for-apis-cookbook-with-blog
# Publish the local changes
git push -u origin main